Category: Talks

We are slap-bang in the middle of my busiest time of year right now, with PROCJAM coming up in the next month, conferences happening, grant deadlines, book deadlines, and lots more. I wanted to slip in with a quick post here about some things that have been going on recently, and to mention a project I put up on GitHub today that you might be interested in!

Things are still quiet on the Games By ANGELINA front, but I do have some exciting news – my talks from Eurogamer Rezzed and Indievelopment are now both online for you to watch! My Eurogamer talk was a 25-minute retrospective on my work on ANGELINA, and included lots of tiny prototypes and things that I don’t show very often. You can view that right here:
My Indievelopment talk was titled Generate Everything. In it, I argue that game developers should try to generate every part of their videogames, because in doing so we discover new and exciting things! You can watch that on Vimeo right here:

I’ll be updating my talks page and whatnot very soon with links to these, too. Let me know what you think!

I’ve set up this scheduled post to let you know that you can watch me give a short talk at Eurogamer’s Rezzed event right now by clicking here to watch via their Twitch stream. There’s already been some great talks at Rezzed today, so I hope I can keep up with their level. I’ll be showing some lesser-seen games, demoing some of ANGELINA’s new Unity tricks, and talking about the questions of the future.

Phew! There’s a lot of exciting things coming up. I just wanted to write a little post to let you know:

March 28th, Birmingham, UK – I’m honoured to be giving a Developer Session at EGX Rezzed, a big games event organised by Eurogamer. Come see me at 5pm on the Friday where I’ll be talking about ANGELINA and showing off some games that I rarely or never show people!

Mark Riedl – March 31st, Goldsmiths, London – We’re very fortunate to have Mark Riedl coming to talk at Goldsmiths this month. Mark is a hugely important researcher in interactive narrative and virtual worlds, and you’ll have seen some of his supervised work in previous Saturday Papers. Come and see him talk about his research! Full details of the talk are here.

April 7th, Utrecht, The Netherlands – I’m talking at Indievelopment, a day of talks about videogames. I’m going to be giving a talk called Generate Everything and it’s going to be great. I’m very excited about this. More info over on their site.

If you see me at any of these events, come and say hi! I’ll probably be carrying around floppy disks which you’d be most welcome to, and it’s always nice to meet new people. Both of my talks will be recorded and put online too, which I’ll link to later.

Conference talks are a really great way to communicate about your work. You get sound and vision, you can talk naturally about what’s on screen, and the time limit means you don’t go into laborious detail like you might in a normal paper. That’s one of the reasons why conferences are so great to go to – a good conference talk is worth a dozen articles. Problem is, conferences are very expensive to go to if you’re not employed by a university, and not everyone can travel to them.

I decided that after giving my talk at ICCC 2013 I would try and re-record the audio and put up some slides on YouTube. I finally got around to it today – it’s not bad for a first try I think but I need to work on the idea and my delivery a bit! Still, if you want to know what I talked about, you can watch the first attempt at a YouTube conference talk below. Hopefully this will let a few more people learn about my work in a different way!

I’m a complete newbie to YouTube and making videos. Let me know what you think and what I can do to improve the format!